iBook loses clicker

Lately my iBook has been flaking out. My HD churns for hours at a time, the fan runs when it hardly ever did before. (now running 10.3)

The thing that is the worst is the trackpad button just stops functioning like the computer is locked up. The KB and trackpad works. Even my mouse stops clicking when it happens. I can't do anything except command+Q all my apps and hard reboot. Even then, sometimes I don't get the botton back. I just shut it off for a while.

Lately I have been trying out some new apps but I can't pin anything down to a specific install. Anyone else lost mouseclicking "randomly" before?

Have you updated to 10.3.1? Lots of folks have had problems w/Panther solved by the update.

Repaired permissions? Not sure that this is even relevant, but can't really hurt.

Started in single user mode (cmd-s at start up) and run
fsck -y
or
fsck -f -y
if you're running journalling? That's another general diagnostic tool. (BTW, if fsck fixes anything, you should run it again until it doesn't fix anything at all.)

Also, it could be a problem with the trackpad button itself. You might try to reproduce the problem with an external mouse connected and see if the mouse button works. If it does, you might just get a small travel mouse as a (non-)fix. I think that having the button fixed might be expensive -- generally Apple charges alot for case repairs.

Well like I said, even the mouse stops working when this happens. It really sucks when it does. I finally installed 10.3.1 after posting this (since I found nothing really negative about the update). It doesn't seem to have happened since then, but it is the weekend and I haven't been on my ibook much.

I've found that the x.x.1 updates for anything are usually pretty important -- they usually address some specific things that didn't turn up in testing but turn out to be important enough and common enough for the programmers to release an update hot on the heals of their finished product. Just when they thought they could take a breather....

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